Drilling down one little bit more, as the tenth anniversary of 2000 comes closer, it strikes me that one of the weird things about the decade, other than how the internet has come to rule our lives without a peep over the downsides, is that the West and the world world received a number of huge hammerings. In the first half of the decade, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan coming after the attack on New York left people - bloggers even - scrambling to figure out new ways to describe fear. While I grew up in an era when and a fear because my town and county might be glazed by Soviet nuclear technology on a few moment's notice, the random violence of Islamo-fascists created something new. The idea that you and your fellow travelers on public transit might be murdered, that buildings again would picked out and fall froze us in a new way. Then the wars drew out, then the tsunami killed hundreds of thousands, then Katrina, then so many other things took our attention. Then the whole economy nearly collapsed and we learned that the underpinnings of the system of capitalism in the US was a shell game and that the dull regulated banking systems of Canada and France and Norway were safer even if they could never be the furnace of wealth and risk that has founded the miracle. And the wars continued.

It has been a hard decade. I am not sure whether we have become hardened or dulled by all the hits. Are we better off for it all?